How to chain multiple different InputStreams into one InputStream

It's right there in JDK! Quoting JavaDoc of SequenceInputStream:

A SequenceInputStream represents the logical concatenation of other input streams. It starts out with an ordered collection of input streams and reads from the first one until end of file is reached, whereupon it reads from the second one, and so on, until end of file is reached on the last of the contained input streams.

You want to concatenate arbitrary number of InputStreams while SequenceInputStream accepts only two. But since SequenceInputStream is also an InputStream you can apply it recursively (nest them):

new SequenceInputStream(
    new SequenceInputStream(
        new SequenceInputStream(file1, file2),
        file3
    ),
    file4
);

...you get the idea.

See also

• How do you merge two input streams in Java? (dup?)

This is done using SequencedInputStream, which is straightforward in Java, as Tomasz Nurkiewicz's answer shows. I had to do this repeatedly in a project recently, so I added some Scala-y goodness via the "pimp my library" pattern.

object StreamUtils {
  implicit def toRichInputStream(str: InputStream) = new RichInputStream(str)

  class RichInputStream(str: InputStream) {
// a bunch of other handy Stream functionality, deleted

    def ++(str2: InputStream): InputStream = new SequenceInputStream(str, str2)
  }
}

With that, I can do stream sequencing as follows

val mergedStream = stream1++stream2++stream3

or even

val streamList = //some arbitrary-length list of streams, non-empty
val mergedStream = streamList.reduceLeft(_++_)